Eritrean and EU officials signed the National Indicative Programme (NIP) on the 29 January 2016. The EU will now send €200 million of aid aimed at improving the energy sector and, to a lesser extent, governance in Eritrea. UN officials and experts are highly concerned about how this money will be traced and the underlying logic of such a strategy, yet no European media covered the story.

An independent report found that the British Home Office is returning Eritrean asylum seekers based on a policy that is ‘completely divorced from, and left unconnected to, the objective evidence’. It slams the government’s guidelines as “misleading and biased”.

In late 2015 the ‘Berlingkse Group’ were nominated for the Cavlingprisen, a prestigious Danish journalism award. They were being recognised for their role in exposing a deceptive Danish government report on Eritrea which was used in the UK to reject hundreds of asylum seekers from the east African country. The journalists did not win the award, but the nomination helps highlight the importance of their work and the troubling use of the report by the British Home Office.

Dutch radio station BNR reported on the approach of the Netherlands to track and arrest smugglers and traffickers of human beings. The report was based on the input of experts in the area of human trafficking and smuggling. According to the report, the Dutch approach fails to address the problems on the larger scale. The approach does not take into account the ways that the smuggling and trafficking gangs operate nowadays, says Prof. Mirjam van Reisen.

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